Know it All

1) One of the author’s main points is that Wikipedia goes to strenuous lengths to protect its legitimacy. Not only are there rules for publishing such as the entry must be written from a neutral point of view and all content must be verifiable and previous published. There are specific members like Essjay, who spend their time editing content and structure of the entries. There are also five robots that patrol the entries; they search for obscenities and mass deletions of text. Another main point made by the author is that like other encyclopedias, Wikipedia is not perfect. In a study comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, for every four errors Wikipedia had Britannica had only three. Even though Wikipedia is not perfect, it’s still the most accessible and efficient encyclopedia.

“The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two thousand years and has rarely balked at national borders. Among the first general reference works was Emperor’s Mirror, commissioned in 220 A.D. by a Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to catalogue all human knowledge accelerated in the eighteenth century. In the seventeen-seventies, the Germans, champions of thoroughness, began assembling a two-hundred-and-forty-two-volume masterwork. A few decades earlier, Johann Heinrich Zedler, a Leipzig bookseller, had alarmed local competitors when he solicited articles for his Universal-Lexicon. His rivals, fearing that the work would put them out of business by rendering all other books obsolete, tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the project.

It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship. Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.”

2) The supporting detail of this passage is effective because Schiff starts the passage by talking about the evolution of the encyclopedia, and how it never belonged to just one country. She gave many examples such as the Chinese encyclopedia and a German attempt too. She then concluded it with Pierre Bayle, who constructed the first encyclopedia, even though it was “composed solely of errors.”

3) Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica have both similar and contrasting designs. For starters they are both encyclopedias. However the large difference is one is based solely on paper, the other purely Internet based. Wikipedia is based solely on the Internet and is designed to be all-inclusive. Wikipedia is updated numerous times each day whereas the Encyclopedia Britannica is updated physically every year. Wikipedia was designed to be accessable and efficient and the Encylopedia Britannica was designed to be reference based and to have no questions of legitimacy arise.